Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors labeled police a “terrorist organization” in an unearthed video from 2015, where she asserts she “always” wanted “to fight police.”
The remarks come from a speech at King’s College London as part of the Ferguson Solidarity Tour of the United Kingdom. Cullors reveals that her activism is rooted in a lifelong desire to “fight the police” and conflates the group to a “terrorist organization”:
“I joined organization when I was 17 years old, and I remember the first thing I said to the organization was “do you fight police?” That’s what I wanted to do. I always knew I wanted to fight police. They were the single most, sort of, terrorist organization in my life, and I wanted to know how to fight them.”
“So I started doing work when I was 17 years old against the police,” she adds before detailing how she “ran campaigns that focused on trying to get them out of high schools” and “ran campaigns that focused on decriminalizing young people’s lives.”
Cullors also conflates police to terrorists when describing the motives of the Black Lives Matter, alleging her group seeks to combat “the impact that racism, that terrorism – an I say terrorism I’m talking about police – has on our lives.”
During the event, which was hosted by student groups including Action Palestine, the Intersectional Feminist Society, the African Caribbean Society, and King’s Ethnic Minority Association, Cullors also instructs her audience on how to “shut sh*t down.”
In response to the Ferguson Riots, Cullors recounted how it prompted “many of us go back into our own neighborhoods and shut shit down.”
“One of the biggest things I learned about Ferguson is it does not take 2,000 people to shut shit down. Five people can shut a freeway down. We did it in Los Angeles. 10 people can shut a Walmart down. We did it in Ferguson,” she continued.
Cullors also talks about “occupying” Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) headquarters:
“We’ve been shutting shit down since August 9th. We are still shutting shit down. In Los Angeles, for example, we occupied the Los Angeles Police headquarters for 18 days.”
This unearthed video follows The National Pulse revealing Cullors relishing people comparing her work for its similarities to former Chinese Communist Party Mao Zedong’s “Little Red Book” in a 2010 speech. “I was speaking to this young person from Arizona who’s trying to fight SB 1070, and he grabbed a book, and he said, “It’s like Mao’s Red Book.” [Laughter] And I was like man, that’s what I was thinking, and it was just really cool to hear him make that connection, and I was like how about you buy 10 to 15 of these books and you all have like a youth organizing group where you talk about it and you really try to engage this,” the Black Lives Matter co-founder commented.
